Tag Archives: gaming

I used to use Homepass a few years back but my old Pi broke and I never got around to replacing it. I bought a pair of Raspberry Pi 3‘s recently and decided to put one to use as a StreetPass relay for my and my girlfriend’s 3DS as we seem to live in a desert of 3DS’s right now. Shame!

The Raspberry Pi 3 is perfect for this purpose as you need nothing more than an ethernet cable to your router and power. No need for a USB wireless adapter making everything that much simpler.

If you’re wondering what Homepass or Streetpass is, then no fear…

HomePass is a homebrew method of fooling your 3DS system into believing a Global StreetPass Relay exists in your house.

Nintendo released an update to the 3DS StreetPass system in the beginning of August 2013, that would allow users to receive and transmit StreetPass data via Nintendo Zone Wifi Access Points.

Nintendo calls this new system “StreetPass Relay”. Over at GBATemp.net, great minds came together and figured out how to utilize your home WiFi Router/Access Point as a Nintendo Zone StreetPass Relay — but not just a local one, a GLOBAL relay. You will be able to StreetPass people from around the world. Want tons of streetpasses in a single day, without ever leaving the house? Read on 🙂

I found some instructions and an image on Reddit which you can find here. This preprepared image deals with the bridging, firewall rules, run schedule etc.

If you are using Windows, try using Win32diskimager to write the Pi image to your SD card. On a Mac, I used Apple Pi Baker to great success. I tried a couple of times using terminal but it wouldn’t boot successfully. Apple Pi Baker solved my issue.

I have mine set as default to attempt to run every 6 minutes, with a 2% chance of succeeding. The default is 20%. Every six minutes, the script will attempt to start the access point with a Relay MAC address.

It is effectively a roll of the dice, as you don’t need to be getting StreetPass hits every 6 minutes all day. Well, maybe you do. Then you can set the run chance to 100%. My relay should effectively run 624.02 times per day on average (about 3) which suits my needs perfectly.

There is a simple way to duplicate any item that is stackable by using the streetpass functionality built into Fantasy Life for Nintendo 3DS.

Fantasy Life’s Streetpass revolves around choosing an item you wish to give to passers-by. However, it does not take the item from you….

It’s been found that you can choose multiples of an item to give away. Let’s start low… how about a stack of gold ore? Well now you and your friend has that stack of gold ore. I’m sure you can see where this is going! How about some Life Cures? They’ll come in handy no doubt. Rare ores like magic or, marine ore, maybe something from the DLC (which I’ve yet to bother buying) are all pretty good ideas. Mine or buy a stack of 99 of them, and voila. You’ll soon have 198 or them.

See what your friends want, and tell them what you want and you can be rich together!

I am slowly making progress through my backlog. Maybe by 2045 I’ll complete it…. From the first list of games to play that I posted after exams ended in May, I tried to spend time on Bad Rats (but it kept crashing), played some Hack Slash and Loot (doubt I’ll make it to an hour, I really don’t like it that much) and started on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

I’m quite enjoying Fate of Atlantis and it’s reminded me how much I enjoy old LucasArts point and click adventures. I’ll have to stop off at Monkey Island soon. They’re just so much fun! Anyway whilst I continue to play OpenTTD and ignore my backlog, I thought I’d create a top games list for each of my backlogged console platforms. Here goes!

WiiU

Lego Hobbit (15h)

Earthbound (30h)

Pikmin 3 (15h)

I’ve done a few days in Pikmin 3, and I’ve completed a chunk of LEGO Hobbit. I’ll probably just keep doing time trials in Mario Kart 8, though. Add me on Miiverse if you want to: geekyjames.

3DS/DS

Phoenix Wright Dual Destinies (30h)

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask (25h)

Magical Starsign (40h)

I’m on the 3rd case in Dual Destinies, likely going to have to restart Miracle Mask due to forgetting the story and hopefully able to get over the slooooow text in Magical Starsign although I couldn’t last time I tried.

Vita/PSP

Heh, the screenshots do it better justice… Let’s just say I’ve not started any of these really… I should pick one at random and aim to complete it. The random number generator said 3, 7, and 23… which are… Final Fantasy Tactics, Lemmings (I can finish that!), and Hotline Miami. I’ll give that my best shot…

PS3

Assassins Creed series, Ni No Kuni, Burnout CRASH… So many Playstation Plus games, that honestly makes me wonder why I bother paying around £40 a year for games that I’m likely not going to play since I still buy games on the PSN Store… At least I didn’t buy a single game in the latest steam sale!

Time to crack on, shame I’m back at work for nine days starting this week… At least I’ve finally moved house, and have few responsibilities if any until October when uni starts back up!

Inspired by a Reddit post that I was reading whilst procrastinating, I’ve come up with a nice system for dealing with my Steam backlog that’s approaching nearly four hundred games… Gotta do something. And not change the password and forget it exists…

Anyway, the idea is to play every game for at least 1 hour to see if I enjoy it. If not, whatever, it’s done. Move on, if I do then keep playing. Easy? I’ve inputted my steam games into Excel (via SteamDB and excel’s Web data input wizard) and sorted them into one of four categories. Those I haven’t touched at all, or haven’t reach an hour in. Those that I’ve actually completed properly, ones that I am going to skip over and others that I might go back to later. The latter three all count as “completed” for backlog purposes. I’ll sort out separate lists for PS3, Gog.com games, 3DS and Vita titles that I own too.

Need to Play

Completed

One Hour Completed, It’s DONE

Might Continue

Going forward, I’ve selected the first game that appears for each letter. The first batch is as follows. I think I’ll actually complete more than a few of these (Machinarium, Doodles are Bugged) but there are more than a handful of massive games too (GalCiv, East India Company). I have been meaning to try them at some point, and now I can. This will probably take me till at least the Summer holidays. Wish me luck! Not a lot will get played before exams are over in three weeks. Time to play games revise.

Ace of Spades

Bad Rats

Carrier Command: Gaea Mission

Darkest Hour: Europe ’44-’45

East India Company

F.E.A.R.

Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition

Hack, Slash, Loot

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

Jamestown

Killing Floor

Lead and Gold Gangs of the Wild West

Machinarium

Napoleon: Total War

Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus

Paranautical Activity

RAW Realms of Ancient War

Saira

Take Command: Second Manassas

UFO: Afterlight

Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines

Wargame: European Escalation

Your Doodles Are Bugged!

Zen Bound® 2

Some more rules:

Multiplayer only games can be skipped entirely if I can’t find anyone to play them with.

I was in the mood to play some shorter games (as you may have gathered from my last post) so I started back on playing a few of the Level-5 Guild series games that I had on my console: Liberation Maiden and Attack of the Friday Monsters.

Liberation Maiden

I finished Liberation Maiden in just over an hour on easy mode. It was still pretty challenging for me since I don’t particularly like arcade shooters, but it was a lot of fun. One day I might go back to the individual stages to try and beat my scores, but not any time soon.

Attack of the Friday Monsters

Longer than Liberation Maiden, I also rather enjoyed Attack of the Friday Monsters but I feel that the ending was a bit rushed. The game plays like a visual novel (Think sort of Monkey Island) where you go around talking to various characters, looking for clues, and playing a card game to battle NPCs. The battle system was simple and worked, but probably could of been fleshed out a bit. The story was satsifying (I think, I am still going through it in my mind…) and I’d look forward to a sequel if one were to be announced.

This week I completed (unlocked everything I could) Fun! Fun! Minigolf Touch! for the 3DS. I bought it back in 2012 from the eShop because mini golf is awesome. And then I hardly played it. Maybe it’s because games with ‘Fun! Fun!’ in the title usually aren’t actually that fun? Maybe, I thought that this game was alright. Some courses were ridiculously easy, whilst others were randomly very hard.

Fun! Fun! Minigolf Touch logo

The normal mode was a blast once I got back into it, trickshot mode on the other hand wasn’t brilliant. The requirement to get the ball into a ‘safe zone’ within one shot did get a bit annoying on the more complicated levels as it required absolute precision in aiming each shot. Additonally, some of the more ‘complex’ levels were just the same courses with extra boxes and such in the way. There could of been way more imagination used between the European, Asian, and American Cups. I’m thinking hamburgers, great walls, and Eifel Towers if you get what I mean!

Overall my 3DS Activity Log showed that I’d played the game in it’s entirety for about three hours. I probably should of gotten around to finishing this years ago.

On to the next game! Maybe Phoenix Wright Dual Destiny’s or another 3DS download title. In fact I’ve organised a folder on my 3DS which contains the games I want to finish this year:

Of these, quite a few are shorter then five hours (however ‘how long to beat’ timings for puzzle games can be a bit off sometimes…) so I think I’m going to focus on the shorter games for the next few weeks…

If you’re trying to keep track of the IVs of the Pokémon you’re breeding then try out this amazingly simple web app. Designed for phones and tablets, but it works alright on a laptop or PC too.

If you need reminding the symbols relate to: HP, Attack, Defence, Speed, Special Attack, Special Defence. So if the IV Checker in Kiloude City tells you that the best stats are Attack, Speed and Special Defense (‘They can’t be beat’) then mark the triangle, heart, and diamond. These marking show on the status screen of each pokemon and allows you to quickly sort through the many monsters that you’ve bred.

3ds The 3DS is three this year, now if you’re in Japan and next month everywhere else. Inspired by a post on Reddit, I thought I would take a look back at my 3DS’s Activity Log (which is something every gaming system ought to have!) Here we go:

2011

I bought my system just before the price drop so I got the Ambassador games. Still, it was a pretty bleak year for the 3DS. I was still playing DS games on the DSi XL I had at the time though, so that stats are probably a bit lower than they ought to be.

Total Playtime: 30:58

Total Steps: 60318

Titles: 36

Average / Title: 51 minutes

Mario Kart 7: 5:15

Ocarina of Time: 3:13

eShop: 3:03

2012

I completed a load of Professor Layton games this year, as well as both Generation V Pokemon games. Apparently I didn’t play much else, or what I did play for long with that poor average per game. I played some Mario games and realised I’m crap at platformers so I never got around to completing them, and various eShop titles. This was also the year that I took my 3DS to college every day as seen by the massive increase in steps throughout the year!

Total Playtime: 166:34

Total Steps: 591159

Titles: 73

Average / Title: 02:16

Pokémon Black 2: 20:03

Pokémon Black: 17:49

Streetpass Plaza: 10:54

2013

Aha, finally! Games are coming! I went from playing3 hours a week to over 7! This year mainly saw Animal Crossing (which was the main reason I bought a 3DS in the first place, I knew AC would arrive eventually!) and of course Pokémon Gen 6.

Total Playtime: 381:06

Total Steps: 430339

Titles: 57

Average / Title: 06:41

Animal Crossing New Leaf: 143:48

Pokémon X: 43:51

Animal Crossing Wild World: 35:34

2014

So far this year, I’ve just played Pokémon and Animal Crossing. Hmm. I have so many other great titles to play: MH3, Link Between Worlds, the various Level 5 Guild games from the eShop, Phoenix Wright (that I only bought as it was on sale) among many many others. I wonder what I’ll get around to completing this year!

So, I said I was going to play Leviathan Warships, Link’s Awakening, Half Life, and GTA 5. So far I’ve played Link’s Awakening and Pokémon; I blame Pokémon Bank being released in Europe this morning.It’s made me restart my Heart Gold save to obtain the various legendaries found within it’s world of Kanto and Johto. And I’m loving it! I forgot how much I adored the Generation II remakes! It might be because I have vivid memories of playing Silver as a child. I’m not sure, but HGSS are probably my favourite Pokémon games out of the entire series.

Speaking of Bank and Transporter- whilst they work, they aren’t exactly seamless or fun to use. Transporter is a separate app used to transfer Pokémon from Box 1 of your generation 5 game (and only from Box 1, there is no choice here) and place it into the Transport box. Then you have to close Transporter, swap your cartridge out for X or Y and open Bank, not forgetting to swap the cartridge before you start bank, or else you’ll have to exit Bank to get it to recognize the cartridge. Now you can move the transported Pokémon either into permanent storage on the cloud or save them onto your copy of X or Y.

As for Four in February GTA:V is definitely out. I should get some time to play Half Life and Leviathan Warships this week or next, but I’m probably going to get sidetracked by Heart Gold and Monster Hunter 3 in the mean time… I shouldn’t commit myself to play specific games, should I?

This has been a good week. The game I originally bought my 3DS for back in 2011 was released! Animal Crossing: New Leaf is awesome. There aren’t many other ways to describe it. In fact, in the days since release it’s now my 2nd most played game on my 3DS (Second only to AC:WW). I’ve played for 28 hours and 13 minutes at the time of writing this piece. That’s an average of four hours a day; considering I’ve been working 8 or 9 hours most days this week apparently I haven’t been sleeping much…

What’s so special? Everything! My favourite addition is the island. No more are you stuck farming fruit or turnips for bells. Just head to the island after 7PM and you can easily come home with enough beetles to sell for around 300-400,000 bells a time. At first I thought the community projects were expensive, but now I can see why they’re priced so high. 100,000 bells for a fountain? That’s fifteen minutes bug hunting on the island!

It’s also very easy to take screenshots in game now and share them online to services such as Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter. They also save to your SD card where you can retrieve them whenever you want.

Some highlights of my first week in Pallet:

My gaming TV! Yes, that’s a Wii Balance Board to the Right

My girlfriend came to visit, we watched a movie!

Bad camera angles… Hmm.

Sharks, sharks everywhere!

Playing Hide and Seek… She can’t see me, right?

Completing my first community project!
It’s been a fun week in Pallet but now I feel like I’ll probably slow down a bit and take my time. I do actually want to play some other games, not just New Leaf for the rest of time…. As for online multiplayer, it works really well.